Given that, I am about to make real and interesting decisions about the direction of my career, the discussion around page 414 regarding personal narrative made me sit and think for quite some time and reexamine my motivations.

On the same topic, suppose it'll work out for someone with a liberal arts background starting in college algebra and working up? How important is a strong background in math/science going in? Stuff from the geometry/trig/calculus progression matters only occasionally to programmers - infrequently e...

2 cents... or maybe more like 10! I encountered post-modernism in first year (university) anthropology [...] In context though (as I eventually understood), they were also trying to teach a bunch of ignorant rednecks (australian freshers) not to think of culture in terms of better/worse, primitive/...

Sure. My parents had something like this when I was growing up - so they've been around for some time. You can't recharge them very many times, and they never last as long after the first use, and I'm sure they require more energy input than normal rechargeable batteries, but... yes.

Stream programming is another interesting approach, currently under research. The basic idea is that your high-level conception of your code is one of data flows - data comes in, data is transformed by a possibly-stateful stream processor, and data leaves. Input may have multiple sources and output...

I wouldn't call this my social group - physical presence makes a huge difference, for one thing - but it is still nice to know that there's people with whom I could easily relate. It's not nearly as satisfying as physically being in a crowd of such folk, but there's still some effect there.

To be honest I don't think I have much of a problem at all, I think I'm more just looking for validation of what I feel. Does anyone else have this sort of issue? If xkcd represents the way you are, does it and should it effect the way you read it or the way you see yourself? XKCD is the pattern re...

In response to the axiomatic buildup - if you want to do things in a precise, rational manner, you have to be very careful about how you define your terms. What does it mean for there to be a reason? I agree, actually; I was leaving out a ton of detail, some of which I may not have thought all the ...

I'm totally familiar with this sentiment, as are at least a few others around here: ⋅ What is it that keeps us going? ⋅ Coping ⋅ Existential angst I'm convinced that you can't entirely reason your way out of this sort of loop, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone ...

Not exactly the same thing, but every time I've had something even close to a religious experience, it was at a concert. I'd like to echo and emphasize this sentiment. Playing in orchestra concerts have been my most numinous experiences, by far. In fact, a "religion" of music seems pretty...

Callahan's Law: Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased - thus do we refute entropy. If I have to rationalize it, I keep going because it looks like I only get to die once, and then I don't get to do other stuff. It seems rather suboptimal to end life earlier than necessary. Really, though, ...

Your best bet, if you're willing to cede some authorial control, is to come up with a game skeleton, and then get other people to actually fiddle with the game space. Like a MOO, I suppose, or how Nethack got a lot of its features. Something like a wiki game-world, see, but in code. I suspect that C...

At the expense of pedantry: some get annoyed when you say that a "hacker" forces access into a system; they'd rather you use the term "cracker" instead. There's already a "hacker culture", and very little of it has to do with infringing on other people's property. Just ...

@FiddleMath: I suspect "days" is an exaggeration. Ok, ok, fine. A few roughly-hour long sessions, spanning several days, while I was relaxing at home and eating cookies. I was trying to prove that that particular solution worked. It was rather tantalizing, see, so I kept at it. Still, tha...

Token: Awesome! I stared at that for a few days without ever thinking of changing the construction to make the proof simpler. That's very clean. antonfire: Also awesome, with the edit.Cheers all around!

I've got essentially Antonfire's solution for the s n+1,k+1 general case: the loop collapses when k+1 nails are pulled, and none of the four individual elements independently collapse when any k nails are pulled. But how do you show that, say, s n,k (n+1)s n,k+1 -1 doesn't collapse when k nails are ...

I feel pretty certain that the later parts will take some space to explain, so I'll go ahead and put up this thread. Also, if anyone knows any "math" that looks like this, let me know. I suspect these structures are too pretty to not already be canonized either in algebra or topology, but ...

This is a picture frame. The ends of a string are connected to two corners of the frame, so that the frame can be hung on the flat, featureless wall in front of you. The string is not to be cut, unwound, or in any way disconnected from itself or the picture frame. I am a mildly sadistic and compulsi...

If anyone is ever serious enough about burning a particular book that they might destroy a significant fraction of that book, then something in that book is worth saving and understanding, even if only to understand their impulse. Then again, it's absurd to worry about a single book that hasn't had ...

So: Simplest concievable (redundancy!) meme go! Possibly, The Game. For those who haven't seen it: Rule 1: You are playing The Game. Rule 2: Whenever you think about The Game, you lose. Rule 3: Loss must be announced. For what it's worth, I just lost twenty dollars and my self respect. The Game is ...

I'm 23, and in grad school; almost always busy and actually pretty happy. I constantly overthunk when I was between about 10 and 20, and still find myself doing so occasionally. I always fretted about being a social misfit. (I was.) I freaked out about societal ills, and the state of the world, and ...

Apologies for unearthing buried threads, but a friend of mine wrote the following. He's doing research in programming languages, you see... Two paths diverged in a CFG, and sorry I could not follow both and be one analysis, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it iterated a tr...

Dibley wrote:Nintendo all the way. I haven't done anything with the wii, but these are the people that brought you SNES and N64! I learned to read off those things! Well, the players guides, at least (seriously).

Heh; I honed my reading skills largely on players guides and manuals for the NES.

Python is one of my favorite languages. Certainly, it's not right for every application; but again, no language is. I generally use Python for automating tasks atop other programs, building test harnesses, data processing (so long as it's not too time-intensive), and prototyping programs. Python mak...

Anesthesiology... Well, you need to get comfortable with modular arithmetic. Get comfortable with solving some basic Diophantine equations, and then learn about the Euler totient function and the Legendre symbol. Yes, I'd say those are the basics of number theory. *rimshot, followed by uncomfortable...

I'm a skeptic. I hold all of my beliefs with some shred of doubt, and I have sought out evidence against them. On the other hand, really seeking that evidence takes time, and I've got a lot of other things to do. As BVD said, I think you're going to find more skeptics here than elsewhere. Practicall...

I underwent the same issues you're talking about, from about the time that I was 13 to the time that I was about 16 or 17. During that time, I thought pretty hard about it. Now, I think I've got some decent answers. I wrote down what I've worked out, here , largely so I'd stop worrying about it. It'...

So, Al Zimmerman' Programming Contests might work, if you're really stuck for something to work on. These are projects that you can basically put as much effort into as you like, you have a guaranteed ending date for the project, beyond which there's no pressure to mess with it other than personal i...

I think it'd be actually quite helpful if the xkcd fora maintained a "source materials" thread, subforum, or wiki. In the computer threads, there's generally a "how should I learn how to program?" about once a month. (And there seems to have arisen a general consensus about how t...